America’s
three most wasteful and useless industries are probably energy,
medicine and war; all three barely
deserve to exist, if at all, although they comprise about a third of the American
economy in retail dollars, and perhaps more than half of the economy, when costs
are considered that the market does not measure, such as environmental devastation,
interest on the national debt (as well as the debt
itself), infrastructure costs and so forth. Also, the impossible-to-calculate
cost in human suffering is at awesome levels in all three industries. The situations
painted in this site’s relevant essays argue in support of the
thesis that the larger, more powerful and more monopolistic any industry or
profession becomes, the more it degenerates into a racket, eventually becoming
a dinosaur that only stays alive because it has hogged all the nearby fodder and
kills anything that comes near. Also, because the United States is largely a
nation of brainwashed people, the idea that people need those industries
has been deeply ingrained.

Although
those three industries may be the starkest examples of racketeering in business,
they are by no means the only industries that are worthless, or garner a far greater
share of America’s economic pie than is fair. In medicine, professionals and industries have combined to
create a medical-industrial complex. Other industries and professions also complement
the big three rackets, and help form American society’s power structure. This
essay will present other industries and professions that are corrupted, greatly
inflated or simply worthless. Some could simply fade away to the oblivion they
deserve, while others deserve a far smaller stature than they currently enjoy.

Areas of American life that are filled with
death, dying, suffering and misery are also where the big money is made. American
doctors and lawyers are the earth’s two most highly paid
professional groups, and there is about zero societal benefit derived from their
efforts. The war industry has always been incredibly
lucrative for weapons suppliers, and usually for the “winners," who were
not the soldiers. Tobacco companies have been immensely profitable.
In terms of profits as a percent of sales, the pharmaceutical
business is America’s most lucrative. The industries that have relentlessly
raped the land, mining and forestry in particular, have always done great while
the mines and forests lasted, leaving behind devastated landscapes when the dust
settled.

The
recent trend to privatize the prison system in America is ominous, particularly
when corporations are putting factories in the prisons, paying the inmates wages
below the minimum wage, as they work for such companies as Microsoft (controlled
by the world’s richest man), in what is effectively a new era of slave labor,
where the labor force is in the strongest sense, captive.[1] There is being created an economic
incentive to put people in prison, only different by degree from the concentration camp labor situation of Nazi Germany
during World War II. The journalist-turned-professor Nathan McCall spent years
in prison when he was younger, and a memorable, ironic moment was when he worked
on the prison farm. There was a black man in the South, down on all fours, picking
vegetables, while nearby was the ever-present “white, shotgun-toting prison guard.”
McCall thought about the lives of his ancestors, wondering if it looked the same
during slavery.[2]

With
the world's largest prison population, bringing capitalism to the American prison
industry is creating an incentive to lock up more people, because the more prisoners
there are, the more money is made. There is increasingly no pretense of "protecting"
the public (or even rehabilitation), as most inmates are in there for drug "crimes."
All law enforcement agencies across America, including the judges, have their hands in the drug trade to some degree
(I know it went on in Ventura County), as it is
highly lucrative, which makes the entire imprisoning apparatus appear hypocritical,
as judges and sheriffs lock up their customers, although judges and law enforcement
operate more on the wholesale level, as they lock up the retail customers, making
money going and coming.

The industries
and professions this essay examines have varying levels of racketeering in them;
some are relatively benign, while others are more malignant.

The
Life Insurance Racket

The
case can be made to nearly entirely eliminate the life insurance industry. Life
insurance, as with all insurance, is supposed to be a way to “spread the risk”
of living on earth.

It is a good and
compassionate idea to design a system that can provide for each other as the disasters
of life befall us. Death can come at any time, although in our civilized world,
deaths before “old age” are increasingly rare. During our lives, people can come
to depend on us at times, particularly our children. In tribal life and the extended
families before our modern age, the child was not in a “nuclear” family, so the
issue of premature parental death was not as big as today.

A
system to spread risk should be simple. In life insurance, for instance, death
rates by age group and other trends are easy to come by, requiring no great skill.
Spreading the risk of an untimely death is easy. There can be arguments on how
to do it equitably, and a national tax that all income-earners would pay into,
with benefits mildly graduated along income levels and financial dependents, the
dependents’ ages and the age of the earner, is a possibility. Arguments can be
made about adjustments for smokers, construction workers, number of dependents,
et cetera, but those are minor strategic arguments, not fundamental ones. Somebody
sixty-five years old generally will not have anybody depending on his/her earnings
for the subsequent twenty years, as a twenty-five-year-old father would. Who
would not want their dependents somehow provided for if they die before their
time? Administering the income and payments would be elementary. In life insurance,
there is little need for claims adjusters and the adversarial nature that all-too-often
typifies other types of insurance, pitting claimant against insurer. Death is
not a debatable condition. Similar logic could be applied to all areas of insurance,
such as casualty, medical, et cetera. That is not how it operates in our capitalistic
world, however.

The
first life insurance policy on record was written in London on June 18, 1536,
a one-year policy on the life of William Gybbons. Gybbons died on May 29, 1537,
run over by a hit-and-run bullock cart. In a telling beginning to the industry
and a comment on insurance in general, the company refused to pay the widow and
children of Gybbons, insisting that a year consisted of twelve months of four
weeks each, making Gybbons’ unfortunate death a few days outside of the policy
period. The widow took the insurers to court and won, as the insurers’ logic
was rejected.[3]

In
the early 1800s in America, during the industry’s early days, “term insurance”
was the only kind there was. The policy was as simple as it sounds. It insured
against a person’s death for a specified time. Because America was far from any
socialistic (i.e., taking care of each other) leanings then, insuring one’s life
was a strictly commercial affair. The problem was that with term insurance, the
risk of death was greater as the policyholder aged, so premiums increased over
time. The people who tended to get the insurance were relatively unhealthy or
had others risks of untimely death. Wives of surgeons were uninsurable in those days,
for instance. The risk was not being spread around, and insurance companies got
bankrupted; the industry’s survival was in question.

In
response to that problem, a two-fold ploy was invented, and is today called “whole
life.” Whole life’s premiums did not escalate with age, and there was a “savings”
portion put into the policy benefit, meaning that insurance companies became bankers.
The simple idea of insuring one’s life then became complicated. There are arguments
that the change was necessary if the industry was going to survive, but instead
of creating a safety net for the masses, life insurance became a tremendous scam.
By 1900, the industry was as corrupt as all the other robber baron industries,
which prompted a New York State investigation in 1905 called the Armstrong Joint
Legislative Inquiry, which unearthed many grim activities. America’s “faith”
in the industry evaporated, and it took a combination of some minor reforms and
a lot of public relations to make life insurance “respectable” many years later.
Yet, its “respectability” is not really earned.

In
the 1994 Consumer Reports Life Insurance Handbook, the state of the life
insurance industry was summarized (I have not looked into this situation for several
years, but doubt that much has changed). The book called for reforming the industry,
citing virtually no price competition between the companies, no effective regulation
from state insurance commissioners (who more often act as advocates of the life
insurance companies than the life insurance customer - the regulator
was captured), and a dearth of honest sales tactics, where lying and scam
policies, particularly directed at the elderly, were rampant.

Anybody
who puts their money into a savings account at a bank knows their rate of interest.
With whole life, the customer does not know. The insurance companies merged the
life insurance and savings portions of their policies, and the policyholders never
knew what their “return on investment” was. With whole life policies, the rate
of return can be negative, and has been, but the policyholder never knows. The
life insurance industry was able to get away with it, with many greased palms
in government along the way. Less than half of the money taken in by life insurance
companies goes to pay benefits, the rest pays for high rises across America with
life insurance company names on the top, huge executive salaries, corporate junkets,
amazingly high salesman’s commissions, and often incredible profits.[4]
Consumers get a better payout from the state-run lotteries. Even the “non-profit”
status of mutual companies is largely illusory, as life insurance companies control
more than one and a half trillion dollars in assets, and throw around a great
deal of economic and political muscle, defeating all meaningful attempts to regulate
their avaricious empire-building, gained by bilking the consumer.

The
scam would be less onerous if the consumer had a choice, but people generally
could not buy term insurance in America until the past generation. The policies
existed, but no salesman would sell one. The Consumer’s Union of United States,
Inc., the publisher of Consumer Reports, has advocated buying term insurance
for almost all people for more than fifty years. Yet, it was nearly impossible
to buy term life insurance in America. The reason was that term was not profitable
enough. In the words of Consumer Reports,

“Although
most companies offer term policies, selling term rarely brings in big profits,
and companies encourage their agents to sell the more expensive alternatives.
Encouragement takes the form of generous compensation for cash value policies.
Naturally, agents - like most people - usually sell the products that earn them
the biggest commission.”[5]

Consumer
Reports discussed the deceptions that
life insurance salesmen use the dissuade consumers from buying the vastly cheaper
term policy, as did Norman Dacey in his classic work, What’s Wrong with Your
Life Insurance.

The life insurance
industry has relied on secrecy and lies to sell its product, such as the canard
of “permanent need” and not telling customers where their premium dollar really
went. If a public charity had such a low percent going to beneficiaries, it would
be a tremendous scandal. More than ninety percent of money taken in going to
beneficiaries is a normal percent these days for charities, after a number of
scandals in the “charity” business. There is arguably $200 billion a year going
into zero benefit for the life insurance consumer in America today.[6]
There is no rationale for life insurance payments being less than 95% of income
for a national life insurance plan, except the need to build corporate empires.
Today, the Social Security Administration provides a life insurance benefit for
millions of people, with its administrative fee being less than 1% of income.
The life insurance industry largely does not deserve to exist, except the rationale
of capitalism and making people rich off the idea. The industry is basically
$200 billion a year of pocket lining. If the ultra rich want to insure their
lives for big dollars, although there is virtually no rational need to do that,
there may be a small legitimate market for commercial life insurance. If insurance
companies want to be legitimate investment advisors, let them compete with other
financial advisors, and not hide investment “management” fees behind life insurance
premiums. The latest scam of the industry is “universal” life insurance, which
Dacey exposes as the old scam (an even better scam, perhaps) in new clothing,
in chapter 15 of his book.

There is some good
news to report. Life insurance is also the only industry I know of where somebody
succeeded in fighting its corruption and impacting their racket: enter A. L. Williams.
He is something of an American legend today, and the only instance I know of where
one man took on a huge, corrupt industry, and won. Williams started around 1980,
only selling term insurance. His father died when he was young, and the life
insurance proceeds did support the family long, and Williams eventually took on
the industry, selling term insurance with part-time agents selling from their
homes. Term insurance was the only kind of insurance they sold. Williams was
selling affordable life insurance to the consumer, targeting the average American
wage earner, and not using the proceeds to build high-rises and fund lavish corporate
perks. The life insurance industry banded together and fought his company in
a number of states. The racket was threatened.

By
the mid-1980s, Williams’ company was skyrocketing, and by the 1990s sold by far
the most life insurance protection of any company. Primerica was slandered throughout
the industry. I saw the industry’s propaganda campaign against Primerica first-hand,
when I have shopped for life insurance. As with every company, particularly one
so successful, some Williams agents did some questionable things, there was some
empire-building going on in the company, and Williams himself left the company
under a cloud of allegations. I wonder how much of that controversy was covertly
brought into being by the life insurance industry’s clandestine efforts.[7]
With A. L. Williams, the average American parent of young children got life insurance
that was really affordable for the first time, and that term life insurance did
the only thing that “life” insurance is supposed to do: insure the interest of
financial dependents in the event of a breadwinner’s death. Before A. L. Williams
came along, people simply could not insure their lives in America, but had to
buy the insurance companies’ other “financial services” that were wrapped into
the package.

It can be argued that
150 years ago, when the life insurance industry was young, our government had
no socialist leanings, so the industry was justified. Those days are long gone,
and insuring untimely deaths would be one of the simplest things the government
could do, and few in America would not support such a measure (except of course,
the insurance industry). The life insurance establishment is so rich (from taking
in more premium than was needed) that it is a huge economic and political powerhouse.
It will not go away quietly. I favor dismantling the industry, fairly. I have
a similar idea for energy, cancer treatment,
and the other rackets. I favor letting them walk away from the table with enough
chips to live well on, but calling the game over. Then the future money saved
could be put to something productive, such as retraining life insurance salesmen
and oncologists into productive members of society.

American saw the clout of a related insurance
industry a decade ago when health care reform was attempted by the Clinton administration.
The only real opponent to it was the medical establishment, with the health insurance companies
leading the attack. Wealth and power talks, very loudly, and they shot it down,
along with intense lobbying and a propaganda barrage that is confusing Americans
even today.

An odd thing about the
issue is this: let us say that the life insurance industry was dealt a crushing
blow by an epidemic disease or a meteor hitting New York City. Just as in the
Savings and Loan disaster, the government would make the
taxpayer pick up the tab anyway. The taxpayers are in effect insuring the life
insurance industry anyway.

Banking

I
studied money and banking in college, audited several banks during my career and
also worked for them. Banking can be quite abstract, and it can be difficult
to see the bigger picture. I witnessed the beginning of the Savings
and Loan Scandal, from the inside, with my boss frankly admitting that my
profession abetted it due to its structure, where auditors were not truly independent.
The point has recently been driven home even harder with the Enron
and other corporate scandals, although there is still is no move to reform it.

During my days
with Dennis Lee, before he was arrested the first time, I heard and read many
right-wing theories about how the international banking system worked, how they
were behind the Lincoln assassination and so forth. A summary of that brand of
theorizing is in Epperson's The Unseen Hand, and Mullins' The Secrets
of the Federal Reserve. Those works are considered conspiratorial scholarship,
and Edward Flaherty has a web site on the Internet devoted to debunking the "myths"
that Mullins promotes. From the structural (left wing) perspective is William
Greider's Secrets of the Temple, How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country.
I had a difficult time believing the overarching conspiracy theory regarding the
way the international banking system worked. Yet, I saw too many strange things
to blithely dismiss the conspiratorial perspective; my attitude was kind of "wait
and see." Even so, many aspects of the banking system were startling, from
a structural perspective.

From the
radical perspective comes the work of Noam Chomsky,
Edward Herman and other towering academics. Herman
teaches economics at Wharton, one of the world's most prestigious business schools.
Herman has produced many devastating analyses of how the capitalist system exploits
the world's poor. His Triumph of the Market is an excellent introduction.
Herman’s work stacks up against any economist’s. Herman, Chomsky and others point
out how the international banking scene operates.

Two
banking institutions that have played primary roles in enslaving billions of people
are the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). They are both neocolonial
institutions that really work under the auspices of the United States banking
system, although they are supposedly UN institutions. Their policies have led to a great deal of starvation worldwide. No longer
does the British flag fly over India and a quarter
of the globe. The mechanisms are different, although their ultimate effects are
nearly the same.

Here is how it works
in the neocolonial world. The IMF makes
a loan to a foreign government, for development, so they say. The loan is to
a U.S. client state, which means that it is a dictatorship. The dictator and
his cronies pocket most of the loan, where it ends up in their Swiss bank accounts
(or the loan goes to building roads for oil company use, although the nation’s
citizens own few cars). Legally however, the nation is on the hook for the loan,
not the dictator. The loan did not provide anything productive for the subject
nation's economy, but just lined a dictator's pockets (or helped American corporations
more effectively exploit the nation). The nation now has to pay the loan back.
How do they do that? They end up raising crops for export to earn "foreign
exchange" so they can pay the debt back, or chop down their forests, open
their nation to strip mining, let the oil companies rape them or allow U.S. corporations
to move there, taking advantage of the cheap labor there while putting Americans
out of work. The IMF devises "Structural Adjustment Programs," (SAPs)
that spell out those policies.

Land that
was used to grow food for the local population is instead used to grow food or
other crops (such as jute) for export. The local population starves so they can
pay off the IMF loan, which went into their dictator's pockets. That is not a
rare occurrence, but a typical neocolonial mechanism used to rape
the "Third World." The relief organization Oxfam
has published numerous papers on that issue. The last time I looked several years
ago, of the forty poorest nations on earth, thirty-six exported food to the United
States. That is how America gets cheap bananas, while the people picking the
bananas, such as in Costa Rica and Guatemala,
cannot afford to feed their children. Billions of people have been exploited
in just that fashion. That is why it is called neocolonialism.
The American flag does not fly over Costa Rica and Guatemala, but America gets
their food. If the banana pickers rise up against those exploitative conditions,
the United States bankrolls death squads to keep the people in line, as in El
Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Indonesia and so on. If it gets too out of control,
then America sends in the Marines, to "restore
democracy." Wink, nudge. Suharto and friends raped the Indonesian economy
in neocolonial fashion to the tune of sixty billion dollars, eventually collapsing
an economy that was already enslaved to Western interests. The IMF “rode to the
rescue” in 1998, and its SAP was so draconian that the populace rose up and toppled
Suharto.

That
neocolonial process has been happening for a century, with Wall
Street’s creation of Panama being a pertinent early example. Smedley
Butler was muscle for Wall Street, although he did not figure it out until
after he retired. The Taft Administration's Dollar Diplomacy, following on the
heels of Teddy Roosevelt's Big Stick Diplomacy, showed how the mercantile system
complemented the purely military one. The current IMF programs are merely more
sophisticated methods of slavery, which defraud people out of their land and lives.
Once in awhile, something would leak from those institutions that showed
what was really happening.[8] In reality, the United States is
the world’s stingiest industrialized nation, as even Jimmy Carter has openly admitted.[9]

Other
aspects of the neocolonial banking racket are the "free market" and
international exchange rates. The "free market" is a situation where
the rich and powerful are "free" to exploit the weak. The industrialized
world’s big banks, led by the United States, manipulate exchange rates to where
Third World currencies are nearly worthless, so the peasants have the game rigged
against them even more. They have to work harder to pay more to Western banks,
because their currencies are artificially deflated against the industrialized
nations’ currencies. That is the "free market" at work. The SAP austerity
programs kick in, and the nations are forced to abandon "frills" such
as minimum nutritional standards, primary medicine and education for their populations.
The World Bank has even been behind privatizing public water
supplies, a practice that recently led to a cholera outbreak in South Africa)
of course in the poor black towns. The water supplies of New Jersey are even
being privatized as I write this in the summer of 2002.[10]

It
is a new form of slavery, but done through the banking system. The neocolonial
New World Order has enslaved billions of people, and the 1999 WTO protests in
Seattle were part of an effort to end the practice (I marched in the “Jubilee
2000” procession the night before, which is about forgiving the Third World Debt
- I missed the tear gas the next day, to my relief). International treaties such
as NAFTA and GATT are designed to break down all international barriers to the
power of capital. It is designed to make the world into one big plantation.

That is not right wing paranoia. It is happening
as I write this, so well documented that it cannot be denied, but the capitalist
press has been busy brainwashing the American public, with the Wall Street
Journal banging the drum. Recently, there was the debt "crisis"
in Indonesia, Korea, Brazil and several Asian nations. South Korea’s citizens
protested the help that the IMF was about to give, and they knew how the deal
would go down. In addition, the international currency markets have been turned
into almost purely speculative affairs, a kind of global casino, something that
even the London Financial Times has remarked on. The poor are the people
paying for those policies, as usual.

I
have friends from my business school days who think that those policies actually
help those factory workers in Indonesia who are making our Nike shoes. Establishment hacks
do not dare debate somebody like Herman in a fair and nationally televised debate,
because they would be handed their heads.

Perhaps
the darkest aspect of all the human suffering being caused by such monetary policies,
with the United States leading the way, is that it is estimated that for forty
billion dollars per year, every person on the planet would be guaranteed all the
food, shelter and education that they need. Forty billion dollars is less than
a quarter of the money that is squandered each year in the Pentagon
budget, just the part that is waste. It is surreal.

That
part of the banking game is undeniable, not part of a bizarre conspiracy theory.
That is how global capitalism works. Flaherty, an economist who loves debunking
Federal Reserve conspiracy theories and apparently admires Julian
Simon, will not touch the IMF's shenanigans with a ten-foot pole. Simon,
an economist, did not even mention the IMF in his "good news"
manifesto, The State of Humanity. If The State of Humanity was
a credible piece of scholarship, and Simon truly cared about the state of humanity,
the IMF and Third World debt situation would have been one of the book's central
concerns. Instead, Simon worshipped the non-existent "free market."
The IMF situation is not "good news," however, except for corporate
profits, Western consumers and the plutocratic elite of the subject nations, who
have sold “their” people into neocolonial slavery.

A
Neocolonialist Speaks Out

Reading Ralph
McGehee’sDeadly Deceits helped me figure out the American foreign
policy game, similar to Smedley Butler’s confession. McGehee and Butler
had to live with their consciences and could not keep silent in their retirement
years. I had heard about servants for the Rothschilds and Rockefellers writing
memoirs about what really happens on the inside, only to have the books suppressed,
including buying out the publishing companies that tried publishing the books.
I have not heard of anybody publishing anything from deep inside the beast, but
in 2004, a member of “middle management” of the global corporate empire spoke
out, and John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is the War is a Racket of our time.

McGehee
was an imperial foot soldier, not beginning to figure out the game until he came
up with the “wrong answer” in America’s war
against communism. Perkins was on the “privatized” side of the empire, in what
can be called middle management, and was frankly told about the nature of his
job early on. His cronies literally called themselves “economic hit men,” or
EHM for short.[11] He was taught
the game from the inside. All the World Bank, IMF and USAID “assistance” was
not designed to help the nations receiving the loans, but was designed to enslave
those nations to the neocolonial order (or “corporatocracy” as Perkins called
it), to give American corporate interests access to rape and plunder those nations,
particularly to steal their natural resources and exploit their labor. The elites
of those subject nations would be bribed to play along, but the primary goal was
exploiting the peoples and resources of the subject nations.

Perkins’
meteoric career took him to many neocolonial hot spots, such as Iran, Colombia,
Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Panama and Ecuador. Perkins
became friends with the populist leaders of Panama and Ecuador, Omar Torrijos
and Jaime Roldós, who both refused to kneel to the empire and tried helping their
nation’s poor instead. He worried that the CIA and friends would assassinate
them, and as soon as Ronald Reagan became president, Torrijos and Roldós died
in “accidents” in 1981, where their aircrafts exploded in mid-air, in what were
obviously CIA-style assassinations. Those assassinations served notice to the
world that the relatively gentle days of Carter’s reign were over. Those national
leaders were killed by what Perkins called the “jackals.” When bribes of IMF,
World Bank, USAID and illicit funds are not sufficient, then it becomes time to
set the jackals loose. If the jackals fail, the U.S. military is sent in, as
with Iraq.

As
with Perkins, the jackals rarely worked directly for the U.S. government, but
were “privatized” covert action operatives.[12] Perkins was taught
that privatizing covert action had been a trend ever since Kermit Roosevelt, the
grandson of president Teddy, overthrew the Iranian
government while working for the CIA on behalf of Western oil companies in
1953.[13] Being
on the government payroll was problematic, as the Iran-Contra scandal showed.
Privatized covert action operatives were much harder to expose and easier to deny,
and their activities did not leave the paper trail that government operatives
could leave. Privatized covert action was much tidier and could be more effective.
Perkins likened the jackals to mafia enforcers, but the jackals serve global corporate
empires, not local gangster turf.[14]
I have a relative who was a privatized jackal who worked for a household-name
“diplomat.” His secret career destroyed his life, and I will not be able to publish
his tale for a long time, for jackal-related reasons.

Perkins’
first job was working for the Peace Corps in the Amazon, to see if he was fit
for the rigors of EHM life in Third World countries (although he signed up for
idealistic motives, as with most Peace Corps volunteers). The Peace Corps is
also a tool of the empire, and even some missionary
groups are imperial tools, trying persuasion before the jackals are sent in.[15]

As with
McGehee, those working for Perkins were not explicitly told about the true nature
of their work, and it was the rare person who even wanted to know. Perkins
kept his underlings in the dark about what they truly worked for, and often felt
jealous of their naïveté.[16]

Perkins’ path and mine crossed over the Seabrook
nuclear power plant, as I tried to help make it
obsolete while he promoted it, knowing that nuclear power was anything but
safe and cheap.[17] Perkins’ self-loathing over his
life’s path led him to publish his book, even though he was bribed handsomely
to never publish his memoirs as an EHM.[18] He even got to start an alternative
energy company that was bought out by an oil company for top dollar. Perkins
always avoided the hero/martyr path, so never allowed the game to reach the stage
of being made an offer he could not refuse.

Depressingly, as with other whistleblowers, his allies discouraged
him from publishing his book. They did not want him to “commit the truth” and
rock the boat. Perkins did not heed their advice and the world owes him a debt
for his courageous act of conscience. As usual, he is obviously far less than
one-in-a-thousand among the ranks of economic hit
men, being about the only one to date to name the real game, particularly in book
form.

The
Darker Side of the Banking Game

Those
IMF-type aspects of the banking racket are impossible to fairly
deny, particularly in light of Perkins’ confession,
and are part of the war against the poor.[19]
Conspiracy theories surrounding the Federal Reserve, the Rothschilds, Rockefellers
and other elites I had read plenty about, and during my
days with Dennis I saw strange events. The meeting that Dennis had with bankers
and "European interests" who wanted to pay
him a billion dollars or so to stop pursuing free energy neatly aligns with
the international conspiracy theories. When Steven Greer interacted with the
people who essentially control the world economy,
they offered that he get as many credit cards as he wanted, charge as much as
he wanted, and they would make all the charges disappear through their control
of the banking system.[20]
They tried to buy him.

Even
though we were targeted by an elaborate sting operation, I was repeatedly told,
by a wide array of people, to not put the big money we were negotiating
for into the USA’s banking system, because it was one of the world’s most corrupt.
The USA’s banking system regularly froze and/or stole the funds of its depositors
if they were targeted for political-economic reasons. My checks have always cleared
the bank, but being given that warning so many times was troubling. The BCCI and related scandals are only the tip of
the iceberg.

I predict that as the global financial
system collapses, many dark activities will come to light. The banking system
is a key aspect of how the Global Controllers exert
their influence.

Law

One
of my first jobs was cleaning attorney offices. Friends and family members are
lawyers. My first significant encounters with America’s legal system were during
my days with Dennis. In Seattle and Ventura,
with other hints in Boston, I saw lawyers, judges, policemen and investigators
committing great crimes. Lies, deception, intimidation and felonious crimes seemed
to be the specialty of those who worked in the legal system.

I
now realize that my initial impressions were somewhat extreme. I saw people following
orders from those who ran the energy racket. On one hand, officials who committed
those acts were merely following orders or chased the carrot dangled before them.
Most did not realize they were engaging in activities that might exterminate the
human race, but most probably did not care, either, as long as they were amply
rewarded for their efforts. Over the subsequent years since I gained a different
perspective of our legal system, but it is little brighter than what I perceived
earlier.

This site deals with the idea of the
evolution of souls through the physical plane experience, and world history largely
deals with the activities of baby and young souls.
In relation to the legal system, legitimate and illegitimate application of the
law can be a useful way to perceive the dynamics. The Ten Commandments were righteous,
yet they were mainly about forbidden practices. For their day they worked, although
few ever lived by them, Moses breaking his first tablets in disgust. The Fifth
Commandment forbids murder. The commandment is clear and unequivocal, but many
clever people have created an exception to that Commandment whenever the need
arose, such as matters of war, to "defend" one's self, executing "criminals"
and so on. Those clever sophists were among the earliest lawyers.

In
the Bible, Joshua committed genocidal slaughters,
depopulating entire regions for his God, the same God that forbade murder. David
was a god-chosen warrior-king, with beheading Goliath an early feat. The law
was ignored or argued around from nearly the day it was given. Even when Jesus
came along and said to love the enemy, Christians have largely ignored that also,
always rationalizing their slaughters. Europeans
(and their political descendents such as America) are the most murderous people
of all time, by far, and they are nearly all Christians.

Laws
can be legitimate aspects of creating civilizations. In early civilizations the
laws are simple, such as the Ten Commandments. They generally “work” when followed.
People can believe in the law and its application. If everybody follows the law,
all will be well, or so they believe. To some degree it is true. Laws that the
general population does not believe in do not work well. In those more "primitive"
civilizations the laws are simple, and their rules often applied relatively fairly,
although they may be harsh, such as the murderous code in the book of Leviticus,
which directly contradicts the Fifth Commandment. When the law is followed because
it is the law and not because it is just, it ventures into legalism. The spirit
of the law is ignored while the letter is followed. Further degeneration is when
the law is used as a weapon for personal gain, not for justice or helping hold
civilization together. The law becomes seen as a tool in winning. Serving justice,
the spirit of the law and the ideal are lost, and the only goal is winning.

That is about where the United States' legal system
is today, and the West's in general. The American legal system is all about winning,
not justice, which is generally the final stage of a legal system's degeneration.
The law also becomes extraordinarily complicated, and professional specialists
make and interpret laws that no regular citizen can figure out. When that happens,
the legal system is no longer under the citizenry’s control. Legalism overthrows
justice and serves those who control the legal system.

Ancient
Rome just before its collapse was like that.[22]
The tax system was extremely unfair, and tax collectors and lawyers were thoroughly
corrupt, just as in today’s United States. The legal system was an extraordinarily
complicated maze of laws that no citizen could navigate without a lawyer's help,
and the lawyers often betrayed their own clients. The only winners were the lawyers.
Today, seventy percent of the world's lawyers live in the United States, and the
last time I checked, somewhere around ten percent of them are millionaires. That
is a symptom of a society in decay and on its way out.

The
state of America’s legal system, with its extraordinary complexity and thorough
corruption, where an honest lawyer (one who seeks justice, not winning) is nearly
impossible to find, is simply a sign of the times. That so many point to a scrap
of parchment, the U.S. Constitution, and hold it to be holy (or even worse, the flag), is another sign of the times. George Washington
crafted a legalistic strategy to defraud Native
Americans out of their land, which was immediately embraced by the government,
to demonstrate the Founding Fathers’ reverence
for the law.

There is no
system worth worshipping; worshipping any system is a form of idolatry. The U.S.
Constitution was influenced by Native American tribes,
and was designed to limit the power of government, and has failed miserably.
A piece of paper cannot prevent corruption. If everybody found a way around the
unequivocal Fifth Commandment, finding a way around the Constitution has been
easy. Our government increasingly does not even have the pretense of serving
the public interest and the public knows it, which is why Americans vote less than any "free" people on the planet,
because they know it does not matter. The same rich people own all the candidates,
and the laws are written and enforced to look after powerful interests. That
is also why the underclass populates America’s prisons.

In
a healthy society there are few laws, everybody knows them well, and no lawyers
interpret them. There are also no prisons or punitive institutions. There were
no prisons in the New World in 1491. That is the polar opposite of the United
States. Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God states that in highly
evolved societies they only have three laws. They are:

The
only earthly societies ever approaching that ideal have been "primitive"
societies. Communism (at least the Soviet and Chinese versions of it) tried living
by the ideals of one and two, but did not live by rule number three. The Declaration
of Independence expressed law one (except for calling Native Americans savages),
but the Constitution did not originally approach that ideal, with slaves, natives
and women specifically excluded from the "we are all one" ideal. Nearly
all American laws are coercive, which also ignores rule three. Capitalism, on
the other hand, sort of honors rule three. Nobody has to do anything, but if
they want food in their belly and a roof over their head they need to labor for
the capitalists who own everything. Capitalism is diametrically opposed to rule
two, elevating greed to a virtue. Capitalism does
not even pretend to honor rule one. Nationalism is also diametrically opposed
to rule one. It is us versus them in nationalism, each nation believing they
are a great people, and that "great people" self-image is then used
to justify warring against their neighbors, egotistically elevating themselves
in their eyes at the expense of others. Nationalism often exploits the masses
for elite benefit. Racism and most religions also ignore rule one. People are
OK only if they belong to the right religion or race. Most Christian sects ignore
rule three, with the more literalist sects requiring that people accept Jesus
as their personal savior in order to be "saved." As Walsch's god observed,
America is a primitive society, and one mark of a primitive society is how it
regards regression as progress.

My friends and
family members who became lawyers were starry-eyed in the beginning, much as I
was when I attended business school. Their
eyes were opened much faster than mine were. They either got out of law or became
bitterly cynical a few years after receiving their law degree, and sought niches
of the profession that were less revolting than others. None of them have any
starry-eyed idealism about our legal system anymore. As far as providing any
benefit to society, our legal system could disappear tomorrow and everybody would
probably be better off. "Anarchy" is probably preferable to the juggernaut
that is taking the world to the brink of destruction.

Several
times I have seen American judges make rulings that made a lawyer's jaw drop open,
with the lawyer saying in dismay, "They can't do that!" Dennis has
seen it more times than he cares to remember. When the people who run this nation
use the legal system to wipe somebody out, the law is not worth the paper it is
printed on. The police commit felonies while fabricating
charges that the prosecution fraudulently pursues,
and the judge rubber stamps it all and makes sure that anything but justice
is served as they kangaroo their hapless victim into a long prison stint, and
perhaps also arranging for the inmate's murder in prison. All those officials
had their palms well greased to participate in the snuff job, with promotions,
money under the table, and other benefits. If I had not lived through it, I may
not have believed it. It works that way in both the medical
and energy rackets. Dennis has called it the "just us" system. More
than once I have seen lawyers who challenged our legal system become quickly disbarred
on fabricated charges or threatened with it to
keep them in line.

Every profession and
industry has prostituted itself to one degree or another, but the legal profession
probably sells itself to the highest bidder more often than any other. Most of
America’s politicians are lawyers, as well as its judges. I am not sure exactly
what lawyers make in America, but it is probably somewhere around thirty-to-forty
billion dollars a year, for another complete waste of money. It is worse than
a total waste, as they are helping prop up our ethically bankrupt system.

Housing
and Construction

During
my days with Dennis, we dealt with many inventors. Some inventions were truly
extraordinary. To my eventual dismay, and a realization I resisted for many years,
the biggest obstacles are not really the "bad guys" protecting their
turf from innovation, as in the medical racket and cancer
treatment. Most inventors we met were greedy. Their greed and dishonesty
sabotaged more deals than being squashed by the "bad guys." Also, Dennis'
allies hurt him more often than the "bad guys," also having greed as
their primary motivation, when it came time to show their true colors. The same
happened with most employees, when times got tough.

One
group we dealt with was Australian, and they developed a plastic house. It was
made of a revolutionary plastic, and was made into modular pieces. A three-man
team could build a house from it in two days without even using a hammer, and
it would last nearly two thousand years. The houses looked good, and were cheaper
than houses of today. As usual, they ran into many obstacles, such as the construction
industry trying to wipe them out, their partners making things difficult, etc.
If homes were made from that plastic, the world would be housed in a few years
at significant cost, but then nobody would need to build a house for two thousand
years. In the United States today, about two hundred billion dollars a year is
spent on residential housing, with about another hundred billion a year spent
on non-residential construction.

It is not any
stretch of the imagination to see a worldwide construction project where everybody
gets a home that will last two thousand years. That is only one way to do it.
There are others. In those scenarios, everybody has a dwelling
that is paid for, free and clear, and it will last thousands of years. Amortized
over two thousand years, the cost of housing virtually vanishes. Also, it would
end one of the darker aspects of our "civilization" - most Americans
and most people on earth are only a few paychecks away from being thrown out onto
the streets. It is a barbaric and inhumane system, but is a great racket for
banks, the construction industry and other predators.
That global housing situation is a major reason why people live lives of quiet
desperation, knowing they are always near the edge, and have to keep punching
that clock or be homeless. The housing situation helps keep humanity enslaved.
Houses can be made out of completely recyclable materials, have high quality,
can be made to exist in harmony with the environment, to where humanity could
live indefinitely on the earth, with dwellings that cost virtually nothing.

Agribusiness

When
the USDA tried regulating the organic food industry
in a way that would have nearly eliminated it, the voice of agribusiness was heard.
Fortunately, 250,000 American voices, including mine, were heard, so we won that
round. The bedrock of the world economy is food, and has been so for as long
as human beings have walked the earth. Agriculture probably began when hunter-gatherers
drove all the easily hunted big animals to extinction.
Ever since, the “agricultural surplus” has been the basis for all the world’s
civilizations. As forests are the primary creator of soils, razing forests to
grow crops has always eventually destroyed the soils. Deforestation, irrigation
and plow agriculture led to soil salination, mineral depletion, soil loss and
desertification. The long, slow decline of Sumeria demonstrated the long-term
effects of agriculture; the Fertile Crescent is largely desert today. Modern
industrial farming, combined with neocolonialism,
has wreaked environmental devastation on a much vaster scale and far more swiftly.

As
civilizations rose and fell, with copper, bronze
and iron ages increasing humanity’s ability to manipulate
the environment, agriculture became more sophisticated. Because North America
probably had the world’s healthiest soils in 1491,
as the natives lived lightly on the land, the invading Europeans inflicted environmental
devastation that had no precedent, but the land had enough biological wealth to
survive the onslaught…so far (although events such as the Dust Bowl happened).
The rise of capitalism combined with the rise of the United
States led to agricultural empires. There were no robber baron farmers during
the Gilded Age, not of the stature of Rockefeller and other industrialists, although
there were ranching empires.

For years, I was
skeptical that the food industry would turn into a monopolistic/oligopolistic
industry, as energy, medicine and other large industries had, because there were
so many small farms and growing food is the world’s most widespread industry.
However, large segments of agriculture have been taken over by corporate conglomerates.
Many world food markets are controlled by a handful of companies. For instance,
two companies - Cargill and Archer Daniel Midland - control about 80% of the world’s
grain market.

Monsanto
and other companies are creating genetically engineered seeds that create sterile
crops, forcing farmers to buy more seeds the next year. They are also making
seeds dependent on artificial fertilizers and pesticides. It is even scarier
than that. Monsanto came out with Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH), which sucks even
more milk and life out of those factory cows. To millions of Americans, such practices
are not only scary, but evil. With the introduction of BGH, organic dairy farmers
began advertising that there was no BGH in their milk. Because agribusiness companies
largely own the USDA, in a classic instance of regulator
capture, nobody could count on the USDA to find that BGH was harmful. In
an Orwellian summersault, Monsanto sued the organic dairies, trying to make
it illegal for them to state their milk did not have BGH in it. It is similar
to the agribusiness attempts to define “organic” to allow genetic engineering, irradiation and sewer sludge,
then outlaw any higher standard. Fortunately, the American legal system is not
yet that far gone, and Monsanto did not get its way
in court.

Far more frightening
than Monsanto’s BGH antics is what is happening in the realm of genetic engineering.
As industries vent their pollutants into the environment, with industrial assets
such as Elizabeth Whelan providing helpful disinformation,
at least PCBs will one day break down into harmless compounds. With genetically
engineered (GE) organisms, however, it may not be possible to stick that genie
back into the bottle. There are already cases where GE organisms are inadvertently
killing butterflies and other insects. Europe has risen up against the “Frankenfoods”
America is producing, and accordingly, American agribusiness, through neocolonial
institutions such as the WTO, are inflicting punishment onto Europe for daring
oppose the introduction of GE products. An internal memo leaked from an agribusiness
company that presented their strategy. The plan was to flood the world with GE
organisms, and as the contamination becomes universal, anti-GE advocates will
throw up their hands and surrender. A leaked Monsanto memo showed its global
strategy for rigging GE regulation throughout the world. While most Americans
sleep through the process, there is a fierce battle happening
across the world, as nations resist the introduction of GE foods.

There are horrifying aspects of the
current GE craze in agribusiness, but the scariest GE aspect is biological warfare
experimentation in the U.S. military establishment, generally with zero oversight
from any governing bodies. The U.S. military has long used genetic engineering
in its biological warfare research. The “Captain Trips” of Stephen King’s The
Stand is closer to becoming reality each day. Calling it genetic “engineering”
is a misnomer, as scientists barely understand what they are doing, injecting
DNA from a fish into a tomato, and seeing what happens. They are playing with
forces they do not respect or understand. Toying with life’s building blocks
that way, especially when their understanding of life
is so degenerate, may unleash a Captain-Trips-like disease that kills off most
of humanity, and inadvertently. There is plenty of suppressed and ignored
evidence that today’s orthodox understanding of disease is flawed, and that catastrophic epidemics may be more
the result of misery and despair than biological mechanisms. With all the misery
being inflicted onto humanity today, with the United States
leading the way, a major global epidemic, perhaps something like airborne
AIDS, could well sweep humanity, and soon.

The
“Green Revolution,” which dramatically increased crop yields for a generation,
has been hitting the wall of diminishing returns for years, and at great cost;
artificial fertilizers, pesticides and other practices are poisoning the environment
at unprecedented levels, and water tables are plunging across the world from irrigation
over-pumping.[24] Asia, with the world’s largest population, is
rapidly running out of arable land, partly due to its rapid industrialization,
as it plays catch-up with the West. Already, China and India are quickly becoming
dependent on grain imports from the U.S., Canada, Australia and Argentina. Japan
became grain dependent long ago.[25]
The current global warming trend threatens to
create crop failures even more devastating than has been seen in Africa and Asia
during the past generation. Exploding human populations, combined with fast-disappearing
croplands and forests, combined with global warming and air pollution disasters
that have been happening in Asia and Indonesia the past few years, may well conflate
into a famine of a magnitude the world has not seen before. If China and India
begin starving, it will not happen quietly, and could trigger a global war.

The
food industry began rapidly consolidating during the merger and globalization
mania of the 1990s, and global food monopolies are on their way to becoming
a reality. I doubted it was possible fifteen years ago, but have since revised
my thinking. Combine that trend with the disinformation about nutrition that
industrial hired guns such as Steve Milloy and Elizabeth
Whelan have been disseminating, and the coming storm clouds are ominous.
The food racket is nearly here.

Transportation

The
transportation industry is closely related to the energy racket, with car companies working closely with oil
companies to wipe out energy conservation in transportation.
The transportation racket is about the first one I became aware of, when my mentor invented the world's best engine, and
was told to make his funeral plans if he was
serious about developing it. Transportation in America is a virtual monopoly,
with nearly every aspect of it controlled by oligopolies that operate in collusion
with each other and the energy racket. America’s primary mode of transportation
is the automobile, and there are essentially three automobile manufacturers in
America. The story of the Preston Tucker snuff job, fifty years ago, is a standard
case of how the automobile industry protects its turf. The man who told Dennis
how his car company was wiped out is one of many stories
like him.

The airline industry now has only
two vendors for planes: Boeing and Airbus. Virtually all United States air traffic
is controlled by a handful of airlines, and they raise and lower prices in concert.
I recently worked in the travel industry, and industry veterans openly admitted
that major airlines colluded with each other, which was obvious as they regularly
saw them raise and lower prices in unison. The automobile and airplane industries
are virtual monopolies, in classic, capitalistic fashion. Monopolies are always
rackets.

The bona fide conspiracy between General
Motors, Rockefeller oil companies and Firestone Tire to dismantle mass transit
systems in America, especially in Los Angeles, is well known, performed under
the rubric of National City Lines during the 1930s. There were many activities
engaged in where oil and automobile interests had an interlock of interests, with
the public paying dearly, such as putting lead into gasoline.

This
transportation racket section will conclude with a personal anecdote. Walk into
any auto parts store and see the shelves where windshield wipers are sold, with
the packaging boasting that the wipers are made of “natural rubber.” Some wiper
blades will be treated with graphite, for a smoother wipe and longer life, which
cost more than twice what other blades cost. That entire wiper section is completely
unnecessary. Those “natural rubber” blades need to be replaced each year because
the blades’ edges wear out. The “natural rubber” blade is about the flimsiest
one that can be put on a car. There are many kinds of rubber, and automobile
tires are made from Nordel rubber. Nordel is a specially treated rubber, so tires
last 60,000 miles and more while running over roads, not smooth windshields.
In 1990, I saw a mail order ad for wiper blades made from Nordel rubber, which
were guaranteed to last for the car’s life. They sold for less than $20 for a
pair, about twice what normal blades cost. I bought two pairs for my cars. Unfortunately,
they put their “indestructible” blades in cheap plastic frames, and one pair broke
during the first Ohio snowstorm it was in, as the frames had to contend with the
strain of snow and ice on the windshield. That was an example of the poor design
decisions that plague all inventing. The other
pair’s frames, however, did not break in snowstorms. Those blades worked fine
for the next eight years, until my car was destroyed by another car crashing into
it. If my car had not been destroyed, I am sure those blades would be serving
me today, more than eleven years later.

Today,
nobody sells Nordel blade windshield wipers, except for extremely high-end wipers
for RVs and such, costing more than one hundred dollars per pair. Why? Putting
Nordel rubber in windshield wipers on cars in the factory would cost only a few
cents more per car, and those blades would last for the car’s life. Instead,
there is an entire industry devoted to replacing windshield wipers every year.
The windshield wiper blade industry is a scam. That is only one minor component
of cars, but that situation typifies the kinds of “planned obsolescence” and other
activities that are outright racketeering.

Waste
Management

Waste
management is a huge racket, and part of a diabolical design. One favorite racketeering
strategy is to make a huge amount of money in creating a problem, and then make
a huge amount of money in “solving” it. The “solution,” however, is never the
best one, and the public is milked for generations to “solve” the problem. The
nuclear energy industry is a classic example of that strategy. Free energy has probably been suppressed for nearly a century, going
back to Tesla and even earlier. The nuclear industry
created immense environmental devastation and human
harm in producing and refining the uranium used. Vast sums of money have
been made in that business. The war racket also came to
that trough, with the insane (or diabolically sane) buildup of nuclear weapon
stockpiles. Cleaning the mess up is another huge racket. I spoke at Department of Energy (DOE) hearings regarding
the nuclear waste problem. The nuclear waste problem is one of the more dangerous
that faces humanity at this time, and the management of it has turned into a racket,
with viable solutions ignored, as even admitted to us by the DOE.

With more mundane waste, such as municipal garbage and landfills, it is
well known that organized crime virtually runs the industry in America, especially
in Chicago, New York and other eastern American cities. During my days with Dennis,
I watched ingenious answers to municipal and industrial waste problems be squashed
by those who run the waste management racket.

When
the CIA is examined, with Wall Street dominating it,
and it hiring the Nazisand the Mafia, the
realization quickly arrives that there is little difference between a Nazi, a
gangster, and a CIA civil servant. They all work for the same team. As Smedley Butler remarked, members of the Italian
Mafia are minor leaguers. The Mafia does stuff such as take over labor unions
and municipal waste management, and serve as drug
middlemen. That is the small stuff. The big rackets are taking over the
federal government and managing nuclear waste, sending out armies to enslave entire
nations and running the prisons. That is the big time racketeering.
The Mafia are small timers, which is why they end up in prison. The big time
criminals, such as most of our U.S. Presidents
and corporate executives, never go the prison,
although the blood on their hands is vastly greater than Al Capone could have
ever aspired to. The big gangsterism is done while waving
the flag, sitting atop skyscrapers, lounging on palatial estates and pursuing
the sacred profit. Most of waste management is a waste, with cheap and effective
solutions wiped out, and answers such as not creating the waste in the first place,
or completely recycling it, forbidden.

The
Capitalism Racket

This
essay could present the racketeering aspects of many other industries and professions,
but the point has probably been made: they are all self-serving above all
else, because people are mostly self-serving.
When American executives candidly admit the only purpose their industries have
in existing is not serving the public, but making
a profit, it is admitting that serving others is a charade, as the real purpose,
the overriding purpose, is serving one’s self.

This
site’s series of racketeering essays
has examined industries and professions whose revenues total far more than half
of America’s economy; none of them deserve to be the size they are, and industries
such as energy and war do not deserve to exist at all. To state that half of
America’s economy is worthless might be conservative. It might be more than two-thirds.

In the medical racket, monopolistic practices are not
undertaken by one company, but there is a monopoly
of method. The life insurance racket was also that way,
as are the oil companies. There can be a number
of players, usually a few big ones, but they all sell the same shoddy product
for about the same price. The "innovations" are never significant,
with far more flash than substance, and the cash registers keep ringing. It is
not a law of nature that a few big players come to dominate all those industries.
It is how earthly power works, always grabbing for more. Greed is always insatiable, because it is rooted in
an irrational fear. That is why all industries tend towards monopoly: it eliminates
the competition so huge profits can be made from milking the captive consumer.
There are no free markets. Wall Street’s mega-merger mania is part of the phenomenon.

Capitalists hate the idea of competition, and their
primary goal is eliminating it (John Rockefeller even called competition a "sin"),
as Adam Smith observed. It is the essence of
capitalism. Capitalists eliminate the competition any way they can. If their
competitive adversary is too big, they either collude with them or buy them out.
If their adversary is somebody small like Dennis,
they squash them using the system they control, which includes the press and legal system. It does not
always have to be a “conspiracy,” as such. The Western press is corporately owned, virtually
without exception. Therefore, corporations can do no wrong, and the general worldview
the media presents is how great capitalism is, because the capitalists own
them. The same people own the government and legal system, just as John Jay said,
so the media and legal system can deliver a devastating one-two punch to Dennis and other hero/martyrs,
with only a few people really being in on it.

Capitalism,
organized religion, nationalism and all the “isms” have degenerated into rackets.
Adam Smith had interesting ways to look at capitalism, something that existed
before he gave it a name and provided a theoretical framework. Smith would not
have approved of today’s corporate capitalism. Smith called the profit motive
the “vile maxim of the masters.” Corporate capitalism, as with colonialism,
is another way to exploit the masses, while calling
it “progress.” Smith and Marx agreed that the
workers should control the capital. The corruption of the ideal that Smith saw
is similar to the way that Jesus' message was corrupted, Buddha's, Mohammed's,
etc.

A Jesus, Einstein or Adam Smith will look
at the world in a new way. Their vision is extraordinary, and usually far ahead
of its time. It soon becomes co-opted by the greedy and power-hungry, who twist
it in sometimes subtle ways to serve their ends. The fraudulent aspect is how
the corrupted message becomes a dogma drilled into people's heads, and a twisted
version of the original vision is used to control people, keeping them part of
an exploitable herd. Every “ism” is like that, without exception.

Smith
saw economic dynamics as separated into rents, wages, interest and profits. Standing
alone, that can be a useful way of looking at it, but in other ways it makes presumptions
that other societies did not necessarily share. Rent is considered the economic
exchange for land use. The presumption underlying that idea is that somebody
owns the land. As pure theory, the idea has merit in that land has a real cost
associated with using it. Yet, Native Americans, for instance, could not comprehend
the concept of owning the land, even when it had
been imposed on them for centuries as a way to dispossess them. To many Native
Americans, owning land was like owning the sky. Owning anything is an
egotistical and materialistic concept. All we truly own are our bodies while
we are here.

Smith's concept of wages was imputing
a cost for performing labor. By itself, the idea has merit, but it became corrupted
just as the rent concept has. While Smith was writing, slavery was alive and
well, so the idea of owning people was popular. With the Industrial Revolution,
which Smith specifically wrote about, the idea of renting people instead of owning
them gained in popularity. Again however, the idea as enacted today is that of
a fixed wage, as there is a fixed rent. Those are presumptions, not laws
of nature. The way Smith separated capital from land and labor was an artificial
designation. In capitalism, there is a fundamental antagonism between capital
and rent and wages. Capital is nothing more than the fruit of land and labor
that somebody skimmed off, calling it their own. The capitalist commands the
land and labor, usually violently, setting fixed rates for their use, and the
capitalist gets what is left over. In practice, capital represents little more
than theft, cleverly done. Capitalism is anything but democratic. Communism
was a flawed attempt at economic democracy. Its great flaw was that it was not
voluntary.

It was weird to finally read some
Marx during my awakening and see that he was saying things I had already figured
out on my own, from within the capitalist system. Butler did not denounce America's capitalist imperialism
because he was a Marxist. He came to his conclusions from having open eyes and
the honesty to admit what he saw. The same goes for Ralph McGehee. McGehee was a true believer in his anti-communist
mission. He realized the dishonesty of it from the inside, and realized it because
he believed in his indoctrination, so much so that his Boy Scout honesty drove
him to pursuing his ideal, to finally discovering the Big Lie he had been fed.
He also realized that nobody else wanted to hear it, because it might lead them
to question what they were doing, and few are brave enough to do that. To paraphrase
a Catholic pope, “If you brainwash them when they are young, they will never overcome
it.”

What Native Americans called Mother Earth
became the white man’s "capital."
One man's living space or labor is stolen or exploited and called capital by the
thief. Smith's theorizing is an abstraction, a systematic and artificial way
of viewing the world. By itself, there is nothing wrong with that, or Marx's
theorizing. They are not reality, but theories. When they become dogmatic
catechisms drilled into young heads like mine, then they become methods of control.
There is no ideological system worth believing in. Any system is simply
a tool. Do we not discard wrenches if they break and are no longer useful? The
systems usually benefit those who devised them; which includes nationalism, religion
and communism.

Corporations are artificial entities
that capitalists have worked hard at giving superhuman rights.[26] It has created extremes that
earth has never seen before, where Bill Gates' net worth is greater than the combined
net worth of more than 100 million of his fellow countrymen, a fortune he amassed
in the span of twenty years. That is not a law of nature, but the outcome of
a system founded upon greed. It is not Bill Gates'
fault; he is just a lucky player in a lottery that most Americans want to play.
Corporate capitalism's great crimes are about not sharing the wealth, and destroying
the world’s real wealth at an unprecedented pace.
Global corporate capitalism is international piracy wearing pinstriped suits. It used to wear
top hats. Now it has gone “casual.”

Activists
are proposing common sense solutions to limit corporate power, and it has the
capitalists shaking in their wingtips. One proposal is that if a corporation
does something truly reprehensible (as most of the Fortune 500 has), the
government has the power to revoke its charter, dissolving the corporation, distributing
its assets to the injured and society at large, and the world has one less rapacious
corporation. That may get the attention of shareholders and the nature of their
societal responsibilities. Profits are not sacred, but are another artificial
aspect of corporations. The sacredness of profits sanctifies being self-serving.
Other activist proposals are: banning political advertising on television, which
is largely mud wrestling anymore, which would be welcome to everybody in America,
except those who own the politicians; stripping corporations of those superhuman
rights; trust busting the media, breaking up its corporate
ownership; and others.[27] The burgeoning
Enron and related scandals will make those “outlandish”
solutions seem far more realistic, although America’s
corporate-owned politicians cannot be counted on to lead the effort, or even
help it much. They may be virtually forced to ratify the inevitable, but they
are far greater obstacles to needed change than leaders of it. They sold their
souls a long time ago, and many of them do not even realize it.

This
site’s racketeering essays have made the case that most the United States economy
is a tremendous waste of time by most of the people involved. Tomorrow, 95% of
the doctors, lawyers, politicians, accountants, soldiers, journalists and corporate
executives could be relocated to the moon, and American society would be better
off. Industries such as energy, transportation, agribusiness
and the military are destroying this planet, for a very
short-lived "benefit," if any. Not only are those professions and industries
largely worthless, they have held back humanity from true progress as they protected
their turf. All that racketeering is the primary reason why the American standard
of living has been declining for a generation.

[4] See Dacey’s What’s Wrong with Your
Life Insurance, especially page 101 where he summarizes the income and benefit
payments of the life insurance industry from 1970 to 1986. Payments were 43%
of income for those years.

[6] The life insurance industry income
for 1992 was $426 billion dollars, the latest number I found when I looked years
ago. This data is out of date, but nothing significant has happened to change
the dynamics that I know of.

[7] A brief summary of the situation is
in Consumer Reports Life Insurance Handbook, edited by Jersey Gilbert and
Ellen Schultz, p. 58 and See Norman F. Dacey’s What’s Wrong with Your Life
Insurance, pp. 400-401.

[8] Joseph Stiglitz was the World Bank’s
chief economist. Before the World Trade Center attacks, he came forward with
information confirming the exact scenario I am painting here. Stiglitz was involved
with the neocolonial raping of post-Cold-War Russia, selling off state assets
at fire sale prices to corporations. See Gregory Palast’s “Four Steps to IMF
Damnation,” published on August 23, 2001, by ZNet.

[9]See Brad Knickerbocker’s
“Where America Stands Among World Empires,” Christian Science Monitor,
December 29, 1999. Jimmy Carter said regarding U.S. foreign aid to poor nations,
“We are the stingiest nation of all.” The world’s richest nations (the West and
Japan) formed the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Official Development Assistance (ODA) is given to poor nations by the rich ones.
The United Nations set a target of 0.7% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of ODA
for the OECD nations. U.S. aid has continually shrunk since the Cold War ended,
and in 1999, of the 22 nations in OECD, the United States ranked dead last in
percent of GDP for its ODA, at 0.1%. Few nations met the 0.7% goal, and the median
was about 0.3%. The United States was a third of the median. It is even worse
than that, because most of the “aid” that the United States gives is tied to U.S.
business deals, where the “aid” is more to gain market penetration for U.S.-based
corporations or other corporate benefit. In reality, almost no American “aid”
benefits the world’s poor, and in fact it usually makes their plight worse, with
military aid propping up some of the most brutal regimes on earth.

[10]
See Barbara Garson’s Johannesburg and New Jersey Water, August 26, 2002, by ZNet.

[11] See John Perkins’s Confessions
of an Economic Hit Man, pp. xi, 14.

[12] See John Perkins’s Confessions
of an Economic Hit Man, pp. 199-200.

[13] See John Perkins’s Confessions
of an Economic Hit Man, p. 18. See also Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s
Men.

[17] See John Perkins’s Confessions
of an Economic Hit Man, pp, 154, 162.

[18] See John Perkins’s Confessions
of an Economic Hit Man, pp, 148, 167-172.

[19] Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer wrote War
Against the Poor, which shows how such neocolonial, "low intensity"
tactics are inflicted on the world’s poor. His book focused on Central America
in the 1980s. At home in America, Michael Hudson's Merchants of Misery
shows how similar strategies are directed toward America’s poor.

[21] When Dennis was
released from jail in 1989, he asked me to rejoin his efforts. I declined his
offer. Helping him escape jail was my parting gift. My journey
was already taking a different direction, which led to this website, among other
life experiences. My approach to the energy issue
today is markedly different than Dennis’s. In 1990, I moved to Ohio, have not
seen Ventura County since then, and do not plan to ever return. Dennis kept trying
to recruit me over the years, but I was reluctant. In 1996, after several wearying
years as a trucking company controller, I rejoined Dennis. Dennis visited
me in 1995, and my second journey with Dennis began in early 1996, when his wife
asked me to come to New Jersey to help develop their accounting system, because
they were becoming prominent again. Dennis did two national tours in 1996, and
in that winter/spring, he had a show in Columbus. I attended it to see him, and
expected a few dozen people at most. I was surprised to see hundreds of people
there. Our first “Greatest Energy Show on Earth” in 1987 had less
than forty people attend. In Columbus, Dennis was demonstrating technologies
from our Ventura days.

After
his Philadelphia show, I rejoined
Dennis in New Jersey, the fourth state in which I have worked for him. A few
weeks after I rejoined Dennis, we received a letter from our phone company which
informed us that early in 1996, during Dennis’s first national tour, the Justice
Department subpoenaed our phone records and put a ninety-day gag order on the
phone company, preventing them from notifying us of the investigation. When the
ninety-day order expired, the Justice Department renewed the gag order for another
ninety days. When the second order expired, the phone company was finally allowed
to inform us that the Justice Department had subpoenaed our records. It was not
the first time that the Justice Department had investigated us, and when I
read that letter from the phone company, it brought back memories
of the sharks circling. In these neo-Orwellian days, we might never be informed that
the government had subpoenaed our records.

During
those days with Dennis, I read a letter from Al Gore, where he backed off from
further involvement with Brown’s Gas for neutralizing
nuclear waste, writing that he believed that Brown’s Gas was too dangerous
for the task. At the time, I was related to somebody high in the Clinton administration
that I could have approached for influence with the Department of Energy (DOE),
but the person was a political hack and I did not even try. Instead, Dennis and
I spoke at DOE hearings a few months later, and the hearings’ organizer admitted
to my face that nuclear waste management was a racket.

Those years of encountering the genuine and the bogus, at global levels
at times, were the backdrop for the “sting” that somebody mounted against us.
When I joined Dennis in 1996, he was helping a group of “Christian businessmen.”
For all the bizarre events I had witnessed so far on my journey, the story of
the Christian businessmen began going into the Twilight Zone. I had several conversations
with the organization’s trustee. The story told to me by Dennis, the trustee
and evidence I saw was that they were a group of radical businessmen based in
Canada that formed a trust with more than a trillion dollars in assets. The trust
“only” had equity of about $25 billion. They were using their trust for radical
activism, and they gave a billion dollars of food and supplies to the Soviet military
when the Soviet Empire was crumbling. I watched a news clip from Canada after
they made that gift, where the reporter was asking the trust’s CEO, sitting in
his office, who the heck they were, giving a billion dollars of food and supplies
to the Soviet military. The CEO modestly replied that they were just “Christian
businessmen.”

Soon
after they made that contribution, the global banking system, the USA’s banks
in particular, seized all their cash (more than $20 billion), giving the excuse
that moving billions of dollars around like that gave the banking system liquidity
issues, so they uniformly froze all the trust’s money, which effectively pauperized
them.

Offshore
trusts are a well-known device that the rich and powerful use to escape taxation
and accountability. The world of offshore trusts is shadowy due to its secretive
nature. It is also well known that the world’s big banks have, to one extent
or another, been involved with laundering money derived from the global drug trade.

Not long after the Philadelphia
show, Dennis was approached by an indigenous group with sovereign nation status,
stating that they contacted Dennis after praying for the best way to help heal
the planet. They wanted to help fund Dennis’s nuclear waste neutralization efforts
and the energy technologies he was developing/promoting. They said they were
raising the money by playing the international bank trading game, using their
sovereign nation status. Their financial advisor had a penthouse suite in Manhattan.
Dennis had several meetings with the group and their advisor. I had conversations
with the Christian trust’s trustee and the sovereign nation banker. It all seemed
quite strange, and Dennis was cautious.

There
is a statement that can be given to a federal government covert agent, asking
if they are a government agent. If they are, they are required to acknowledge
it. Dennis gave it to the Christian trust’s CEO, who denied that he was, and
his sadness at Dennis asking such a question was evident. Dennis asked the sovereign
nation what they knew about the Christian trust, and they replied somewhat cryptically,
apparently knowing who they were, but telling Dennis to be cautious.

I
began reading up on those international banking games, talking to members of Dennis’s
network who were trying to put deals together, and I began asking my CPA/CFO pals
if they had ever heard of the weird world that I was beginning to snoop into.
I had a conversation with the Christian trust’s trustee about it, and he told
me that such bank trading deals existed, but almost nobody can really play that
game. The minimum denomination for those bank trades was $100 million, and you
have to know somebody to play. That sovereign nation was playing the same game.
The sovereign nation said that one price of playing that game was giving half
of the profits to a humanitarian cause, and Dennis’s efforts comprised the cause
they planned to fund.

The
Christian trust had a trillion dollars of assets that they could not access because
of the trust’s structure and their $20 billion of frozen funds. They tried going
the legal route and eventually the U.S. Supreme Court became involved, ordering
the USA-based banks to free up the trust’s funds, which the banks essentially
ignored.

On one
hand, I was speaking at DOE hearings and doing business with the Chinese government
(we purchased our Brown’s Gas machines from there), and on the other I was dealing
with the Christian trust and sovereign nation.

While
we were in that milieu, there was also a public effort to have average Americans
play the offshore trust game. While the hyper-elites can play the offshore trust
game, I knew that there was no way that average Americans could, not in significant
numbers. Several years earlier, Dennis interacted with the Patriot Movement, and quickly
discovered that few, if any, leaders of that movement were sincere, but were simply
fleecing the flock of Americans that comprise the militias and related right wing
movements.

I believed
that anybody selling average Americans on the idea that they too could play the
international banking and offshore trust game was probably a criminal. Average
people cannot play those games. The Christian trust and sovereign nation, however,
were not looking to us for money, although we ended up spending thousands of dollars
paying the rent and buying food for the pauperized trustees. They said they were
trying to fund us.

Yull
Brown was reaching the end of his life in 1997 (he died in 1998), and made
many irrational demands that wrecked the deals that Dennis was putting together.
Several years later, when I was in the New Energy Movement, I had a conversation with
a fellow board member who worked closely with Yull in the 1990s, trying to get
Yull USA residency status (several people did, including at least one USA Congressman).
When I related Yull’s antics, that board member replied that those were typical
behaviors for Yull. Brown’s technology is legitimate, but he may not have developed
Brown’s Gas independently and he was very hard to work with. At the Philadelphia
show, five thousand people gave Yull a standing ovation, and Yull played the tape
of that scene endlessly in his last years.

I
left Dennis’s employ in the spring of 1997, and moved home to Seattle. The sovereign
nation never came up with that funding, and the last time I checked with Dennis,
that Christian trust withered away, unsuccessfully trying the legal route to unfreeze
its funds. At one time, they posted up $100 million of trust assets as collateral
for Dennis to try raising money for his nuclear waste program, but nothing came
of it.

Dennis’s
attorney in Ventura had epic battles with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS),
with one of them ending up in the U.S. Supreme Court.
My introduction to alternative politics was the Constitutionalists that Dennis’s
organizations regularly interacted with. I talked with people who had successfully
waged lawsuits to challenge the IRS’s ability to levy and collect taxes, because
the Constitution only empowered Congress for that function.

My
years with Dennis were life changing, traumatic, wondrous and ultimately radicalizing, but few situations challenged my
ideas of how the world worked quite like that radical Christian group’s experiences
did. Much was hard to believe, but encountering unbelievable situations were
frequent during my years with Dennis.

I
have been writing of the coming of economic carnage since
2006, and as the global financial system began collapsing in earnest in 2008,
I began writing about recent events and planned to update my banking writings.
As I did so, I slowly realized that my last stint with Dennis was partly navigating
a hall of mirrors. The bank trades that the sovereign nation was pursing were
almost identical to the description at this link. When
I asked the trustee of that Christian trust about it, he verified it. Now, I
see that all
such deals are considered scams. I always knew they were when they tried
getting average Americans to invest in them, but that the entire bank trade industry
might be a scam got me thinking real hard about those days in 1996-1997. It looks
like somebody was mounting the same sting operation that almost nabbed Tom Bearden, probably at about the
same time.

Were
they all in on it? Probably not. Did that Christian group really have
$20 billion frozen by the big banks? Heck if I know, but I harbor serious doubts
about it today. When the BPA Hit Man helped destroy
Dennis’s Seattle operation, it was one percent provocateur and ninety-nine percent
the greedy, ruthless and gullible. When Dennis’s Ventura company was destroyed,
the ringleader also appeared to be a provocateur,
easily manipulating the avaricious and naïve in Dennis’s organizations. Both
men were involved in later scams, with the Ventura ringleader
being arrested. The BPA Hit Man spent many years developing his fake alternative
energy credentials, and was obviously a professional saboteur. I am less sure
whether the Ventura ringleader was a hired professional or just a freelance criminal.

How much was real and
how much was illusion during those days with Dennis in 1996-1997 is something
I will probably always wonder, but there was obviously a sophisticated operation
mounted to wipe us out, which to some level included the sovereign nation and
that Christian trust. I have to wonder if the Global
Controllers simply hired some of those scamming operations for a “special
project,” or built what we encountered from scratch. I have seen paranoia and
conspiracism destroy people, and those
attempting to undermine my credibility call me a “conspiracy theorist,” but it has been a sobering
experience to ponder the effort behind the sting that almost got us. Maybe I
have to thank Yull for his irrational behavior that blew the deals apart. What
probably saved us is that we were not greedy and money-hungry. Dennis
has always worked on a shoestring, and has always been wary of rich “benefactors”
who never delivered the goods. This is not the first time that I realized
that a covert action bullet whizzed past my head, years after the fact. I suppose
I should feel fortunate and that somebody up there is looking out for me and,
in some ways, I do.

With
my dawning realization of how deeply that sting operation
went, I now have less doubt whether Mr. Skeptic
is another professional provocateur. The “skeptical” societies are uniformly
comprised of rationalist-materialist fundamentalists, with Carl
Sagan its most prominent member; his attitude was almost the very definition
of scientism. The only religious “skeptic” that I have
ever seen is Mr. Skeptic, who is a self-professed Christian. I originally believed
his Christianity to be a minor anomaly, but today, I wonder if he was chosen to
attack Dennis in 1996, using his Christian credentials to gain credibility with
Dennis’s associates, because Dennis has always loudly proclaimed his Christianity.
Mr. Skeptic’s work is clearly dishonest, but
it has not stopped himfrom stalking
me on the Internet since 1997, continuing to portray himself as the voice
of reason. Either Mr. Skeptic is a fanatic the likes of which I have rarely encountered,
or he is another provocateur. For many years, I have been about half convinced
that he was being compensated for his “skeptical” efforts, and now I am more than
half convinced. He lived near the same Justice Department office that subpoenaed
our phone records in 1996. The free energy suppression efforts that I have encountered
have usually been a combination of private and government efforts, which
is typical. It appears that a several-pronged approach may have been used
on us in 1996-1997, with a Justice Department investigation, an elaborate sting
operation, a “skeptic” dogging us, and there were probably unidentified provocateurs
in our midst.

I
write about that sting operation to warn anybody else thinking of taking the high
road to free energy and a healed planet. Powerful and unscrupulous forces oppose
it. Only those with the highest integrity and intention have any business even
trying.

[22] Michael Grant’s The Fall of the
Roman Empire mentions some of those dynamics.

[24] Today, there are
huge "dead zones" in the Baltic and Black Seas and the Gulf of Mexico,
due to agricultural pollution (mostly from nitrogen farming practices, to increase
crop yields) and other man-made problems.

[25] See Lester Brown’s “Facing the Prospect
of Food Scarcity,” in State of the World 1997, pp. 23-39, and Gary Gardner’s
“Preserving Global Cropland,” pp. 42-59.